Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [480]
The black car with the creamy interior was completely unexpected, though Tracy often impulsively bought things for his wife. (“Weeze, I thought you’d like that.”) Usually he gave her jewelry; occasionally paintings. “He said once, ‘Let’s go over and look at these pictures’ in some man’s house,” she remembered. “We went over and he had some very nice things. There was this darling little Grandma Moses and he said, ‘Wouldn’t you like this?’ Well, he got it right there.” He once bought her a Paul Clemens oil in much the same manner. “He would pop up with things.”
Tracy was still making his way across the country when Abby Mann viewed a rough cut of Judgment at Nuremberg. A letter was awaiting him when he returned to St. Ives: “Every writer ought to have the experience of having Spencer Tracy do his lines. There is nothing in the world quite like it. You are, in a way, the Chekhov among actors. Your work is honest, clean, simple, and enormously meaningful.”
Gratified, Tracy responded via his favorite mode of communication, a telegram:
AFTER FINISHING NUREMBERG THE HARD WAY DRIVING ACROSS THE COUNTRY I FOUND YOUR OVERWHELMING MESSAGE. ALL I CAN SAY AFTER READING IT IS IF THE LIGHTS GO NOW I STILL WIN. PLEASE DO NOT FORGET IT WAS A GREAT PRIVILEGE TO SAY THOSE WORDS.
With the general euphoria that attended the completion of Judgment at Nuremberg, it was easy to forget that The Devil at 4 O’Clock was still in production. The effects work—primarily the volcanic eruption at the film’s conclusion—took months to complete. (The island miniature alone took four months to build.) Then in July, just as Tracy was arriving back in Los Angeles, a camera crew was hastily dispatched to Hilo to shoot the eruption of Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii. (An extra crew had been stationed at Kilauea during the film’s location work on Maui, but nothing had happened.) Minus its final pieces, the picture was previewed on July 13, where 354 out of 385 cards rated it either good or excellent. Emboldened by a second, equally successful preview in Pasadena, Columbia set a budget of $1,700,000 for global advertising and promotion, prompted, in part, by the record business being done by The Guns of Navarone. Cosponsoring with Squibb, the studio committed to a month of ABC’s Evening Report—a buy alone valued at $100,000—and set mid-October openings for the picture at New York’s Criterion Theatre and the Stanley Warner in Beverly Hills. At a negative cost of $5,721,786, The Devil at 4 O’Clock was the most expensive picture Columbia had ever made.
Hepburn, meanwhile, had committed to one of the most demanding roles she would ever tackle, that of the drug-addled Mary Tyrone in Ely Landau’s production of A Long Day’s Journey into Night. Director Sidney Lumet wanted Tracy to play Mary’s husband James, a role modeled on the author’s own father, but Tracy resisted the suggestion, even when Kate thought that he might be talked into it.
“Look,” Tracy said to Lumet, “Kate’s the lunatic, she’s the one who goes off and appears at Stratford in Shakespeare—Much Ado, all that stuff. I don’t believe in that nonsense—I’m a movie actor. She’s always doing these things for no money! Here you are with twenty-five thousand each for Long Day’s Journey—crazy! I read it last night, and it’s the best play I ever read. I promise you this: If you offered me this part for five-hundred thousand and somebody else offered me another part for five-hundred thousand, I’d take this!”
Kate exclaimed, “There he goes! No! It’s not going to work!” and the three proceeded to have what Lumet later remembered as “a charming breakfast.